Nonprofits’ Role in Climate Change

Several years ago, a member of our management team suggested that we become carbon neutral and buy offsets to cover our travel. He had looked into it and estimated the cost between $20-40k per year. My response was that our mission is not to resolve climate change, and we can’t invest in areas that don’t directly impact our mission.

This was a black and white issue for me at the time. It would be irresponsible to risk our budget to address something outside our charter. My response was probably similar to many corporate CEOs who agreed with the issue but said they couldn’t risk their organization’s fiscal health and jobs.

Are nonprofits expected to invest in climate change?

For most Americans, this corporate response is increasingly unacceptable. We understand that we can’t address the problem without the participation of our largest employers and energy consumers. What about the smaller businesses and nonprofits? Do we expect them to make this investment? Would it be okay for a homeless shelter to turn away someone because rather than buying another bed, they spent the money on greening their facility?

I am now at the Aspen Ideas Festival where 25 percent of the content is related to climate change. After my fifth session on the topic, it is the clear consensus that we have about ten years to change course.

That is a VERY short window.

Implementing change

Do we need to sacrifice serving that homeless person today to ensure we don’t have millions of additional homeless people in 20-50 years as the coasts are flooded and we have extreme weather destroying coastal housing?

It is an easy answer if it were that simple a trade off. The challenge is that greening nonprofits would have a negligible impact in the face of the growing energy consumption in China alone. But if US nonprofits don’t live our values, what message are we sending about the urgency?

So, what does it mean for a nonprofit to become really green and set the bar for the rest of the world?

From what I am learning in Aspen, there are only two major strategies for major change in the organization’s footprint.

1.  Avoid unnecessary travel by limiting air travel and enabling both telecommuting and virtual teaming.
2. Don’t support the consumption of beef (one of the biggest problems, as 18% of human-created greenhouse gases come from cattle). Adopt a policy of not allowing any organizational funds to be used to purchase beef for events, staff lunches, etc. Read more about beef and climate change here .

There are other smaller wins around paper use, recycling and HVAC management. These matter and should be addressed as well.

If the goal is for nonprofits to adopt these policies to lead the world, then it is also critical to be transparent and public about our behavior.

We can do this in two ways:

1. Make it a standard practice to include social responsibility reporting on annual reports.
2. Educate foundations to require all grant applicants to submit their environmental policy and impact statement as part of their proposal. They already do this for diversity so there is a precedent and infrastructure to do it.

Our management team is meeting on Monday to set our goals for the next year. I will use the opportunity to propose we adopt these policies and use our nonprofit and foundation network to encourage others to follow.

Passionate about climate change? Support causes you care about by volunteering your professional expertise to nonprofits around the world.